MarketingSherpa Blog

Are you getting links to your site from vendors in your field? Publishers are generally so used to marketing to vendors that it’s weird to think of having vendors market for you. Two best ways:

1. Check to see if the vendors (retailers, suppliers, services) who sell to your niche have their own email newsletters or alerts going out to customers and prospects. Then find a way to get a link to your stories or subscription form from their emails. Perhaps you offer a special report (a collection of several articles from your archives, a tip-sheet, whatever). Perhaps you make sure those vendors editors have easy access to the best links to stories that might fit in their ezine.

We do this with our SherpaWeekly newsletter which is a collection of links to our best stories from the week before. And lots of vendors then pick the links up and mention them in their own newsletters. For example last week, GotMarketing linked to three stories of ours, and we gained more than 300 clicks. At our average conversion rate of 68%, that’s a tidy new group of opt-ins.

2. Never email a complete story to a named source or company that was mentioned on your site. Instead, email them a link to the story. That way they forward the link to their entire company, friends, parents, and not the story.

http://www.sherpaweekly.com
http://www.gotmarketing.com

M&A trend: Over the past few weeks several would-be online subscription publishers have approached me to ask, “Do you know any subscription sites I could buy?” One last night added, “They should be already be profitable.” Others have told me they don’t
care whether the publisher is online-only or partially print, but there should be some online component.

Most are looking for small-mid-sized firms to buy. A few hundred B2B subscribers or a few thousand B2C subscribers. Something semi-proven that they can come in and grow substantially with their cash and/or publishing wisdom.

Only problem, these smallish pubs are not remotely interested in selling right now. They probably have 3-5 employees, and are making an OK (maybe not thrilling but definitely OK) living at this, plus enjoying the whole work-in-your-PJs lifestyle. They know when the economy improves they’ll probably make an even
better living. If they want to sell, it’s worth waiting until after the recession to do it because right now you won’t get enough return for your sweat equity investment.

Analogy: You never want to sell your beloved house in a down market when you know it will be worth a whole lot more if you wait a bit, plus where the heck would you live if you sold?

The publisher-side folks who have approached me about selling are almost always the ones which are bigger. Folks with dozens of
employees and a higher burn rate. Often profitable, but maybe just on the edge of it. They’ve worked very hard at growing their
service to be as big as possible, thrown some investor money at it, burned the midnight oil, and gotten it to a thin wedge of black. Not the 20% average profit I was used to seeing as normal for a print niche ezine, but not losing money either.

I’m not sure why these guys want to get out of the game now. Maybe because when they started, they expected it to be a 3-year game. Get money, launch, sell. Now that the economy is dragging, it’s obviously gonna take much lonher than anyone thought to become zillionaires with your dot-com site. So perhaps these guys are cutting their losses and moving on to the next opportunity.

Analogy: These are people who buy houses for investment and then flip them and move on to the next one. It’s not about living in
the house, it’s about moving on to the next one.

Anyway, although loads of people have contacted me on either side of the equation, nobody wants to come public in the Blog, yet. If you do, let me know and I’ll post it here.

editor@contentbiz.com

Otherwise, we’re launching a new ContentBiz
membership site in a few weeks where you’ll be able to post stuff like this privately to our members only.

Home cookware retailer Sur la Table just came up with a clever spin on the whole how-do-I-coordinate-email-and-print-catalog front. I just got an email newsletter issue from them entitled “Sneak preview of our new fall catalog.” Who can resist a sneak peek? The HTML message shows a smallish picture of the front cover of the catalog which you can click on to open it online. Plus the product featured on the front cover of the catalog is also separately pictured with a special price. Nicely done.

Because everyone on this planet reported on the OPA online content sales study when it was released last week, I did not feel the need to Blog it. I figured you guys already saw this stuff, why repeat the masses?

However, this afternoon I spent some time really looking over the numbers their research partner comScore revealed. I must
say, how come many of the numbers don’t match the numbers I hear from publishers both on and off-the-record? Here’s the weird thing: comScore’s numbers are far more positive than most publisher’s numbers. Ego-wise, you would expect the opposite. Publishers saying “We’re so successful” and reality showing a harder face.

The most unbelievable metric comScore revealed was that more than 17% of free ezine readers convert to being paid subscribers.
Whaaaat??

I would like to stress the fact that I like and respect the folks at comScore and their research methodologies are darned impressive. Millions of consumers reporting into panels. Lovely primary data. So what’s up? I’m going to call them…

[Note: Several folks involved with the study who read this Blog have already gotten back to me to set up conversations. Thanks! I’ll be sure to post all my notes here, as always.]

Link to 17-page PDF of study results:

http://www.onlinepublishers.org/opa_paid_content_report_final.pdf

Yet more Irony. Reader Catherine Nowocien of The ABC Companies just emailed over to say that our SherpaWeekly issue this morning which featured an article on how to avoid spam filters, was blocked by her own email system as, yup, spam. It is times like these you have to be grateful that you have a sense of humor. Because otherwise…

Oh now a second reader emailed in. Turns out we were filtered by Yahoo as well. Fine, dandy, arrrgh!

Welcome to the land of Irony. In order to read an article on the PC World Web site featuring this sentence in the very first paragraph, “Online advertising is more cunning, aggressive, and infuriating than ever. More than 25 percent of top Web destinations now use some kind of in-your-face marketing tactics”, I had to battle my way past an annoying pop-up ad that one of PC World’s own advertisers placed there.

A few minutes later, and now a second PC World advertiser pop-up hits me. The fun just never ends.

Just arrived in my in-box, [caps mine] “Hello, Dan McCarthy from RankYou.com. We currently have a product that is a great fit with
your audience. The product is this: www.nopop.net. Consumers hate pop-ups. We ran a solo-mailing ad out to our Sex-E-Bits database of 1.6 million consumers, and we generated over 1,000 sales after two issues. You can promote NoPop.net with banners, Ezine ads, solo-mailings, POP-UPS, any way you want to.”

Boy oh boy, 1,000 sales out of 3.2 million emails. Think of the wealth at $5.50 commission per sale that could be mine if I sent this offer to our 12,000 name ContentBiz list.

Ooh, ooh, ooh, I just got my copy of Aug 2002 Circulation Management Magazine with a cover story on circulation data analysis. The editors collected all of the ABC audit results for America’s top consumer magazines that are audited (magazine publishers that don’t take ads, such as Consumer Reports and Reiman Publishers are not reported here). Why should you care?

Because some of the numbers are kinda neat from a pricing standpoint for consumer online subscriptions. Rightly or wrongly I think that consumers pay for content, not packaging. Consumer magazines have spent millions price testing their brains out. These prices are to some degree more scientifically arrived at than practically any subscription Web site I know of (with the exception of AmericanGreetings.com’s ecard sites). Here’s the breakdown:

Average weekly mag sub price: $47.74 year
Average fortnightly mag sub price: $30.14 year
Average monthly and less frequent sub price: $15.01 year

Which I must say makes me think if you were to rely on sub income alone, it looks like fortnightly is the way to go. You can make
double the money than a monthly can but only pay for certain admin costs (accounting, site hosting, long publisher luncheons, etc) once. Unless your ad sales are incredible, weekly’s not worth it; ouch. Does this translate to online? Quite possibly.

Makes me remember back when everyone said you have to have fresh content daily or you won’t get traffic. Then a friend of mine made a big stink to her audience about updating her site weekly. Instead of being ho-hum expected daily, it became An Event. Her customers actually haunt her site every Thursday at noon when the site’s supposed to update. She saves money on creating and putting up new stuff daily.

BTW: If you want to read the entire Circ article yourself, I’m sure it’s for sale cheap at the magazine’s site:

http://www.circman.com

, VP Marketing Brooks Sports (who make high-end running shoes), took his company’s email newsletter from quarterly to monthly this Spring and he reports that it’s made a big difference in helping his opt-in list grow faster. Turns out an astonishing 45% of his newsletter subscribers forward a copy to friends (that’s higher than most marketer’s open rates, let along pass-along rates). Since there’s a big fat subscribe button at the top of the issues, plus a little text note at the bottom of each isue reading “Please remember to subscribe above if you would like to receive your own custom The Loop newsletter,” a heck of a lot of the people who get forwarded copies join the list. When he was only quarterly he only got that new subscription influx 4x a year. By going monthly it’s 12 times a year.

The newsletter itself is very rich and thick and chocolate. It’s more like a magazine for passionate runners than a marketing newsletter for a shoe company. The sample isssue he sent me had nine stories – including a highly detailed injury prevention tip (approx 800 words) and several people profiles such as a customer-of-the-month profile and a sports medical professional-of-the-month profile.

Heiser knows many recipients may not want to plow through all nine stories each month, so he’s set the subscribe form up so you can choose only to receive the types of stories that appeal to you the most. Basically you get a slightly customized issue. Which is probably one of the reasons his pass-along rate is so incredibly high. People are more likely to open, read and get enthusiastic about content that appeals directly to them.

It may also help cut down on that cut-and-paste problem I mentioned in my Blog below. If you get a newsletter with nine articles and you think your friend will only want one of the articles, I bet you’re tempted to cut and paste, thus depriving Heiser of his chance to get your friend to subscribe with his subscribe offers and other marketing materials in the letter.

Here’s my useful marketing link for the week: Online marketing expert Mark Brownlow has written a 52-page guide to how to market yourself and your company through email discussion lists. You can get a copy free here. Discussion list marketing is one of those great guerilla tactics that’s free, effective (especially in niche markets of almost any kind) and really works when you do it right. Of course, if you do it wrong, you’ll look like a huge a-hole in a fairly public place.

The report Anne referenced is no longer live. However, if you’re looking for email marketing help, you can download the free (and much more recent) MarketingSherpa Quick Guide to Email Marketing: 10 tactics to personalize your message for better results.